I hope to demonstrate that H.D.s Imagism undermines masculinist theories
of impersonality by way of the metaphoric landscape/bodies and language for
transgressive desire she gleaned from the sexually diverse "Greece" of
Victorian Hellenists such as [Walter] Pater, [Oscar] Wilde, and [A. C.]
Swinburne. Sea Gardens white, chiseled, or brazenly colored and marred
sea flowers, its decadent overflowered Venusbergs, and evasive (Swinburnian)
linguistic practices thus forma narrative of competing sexualities and
"unnatural" desires that deliberately implicate the authorial
"I" behind the volume. Indeed, much later, Douglas Bushs Mythology
and the Romantic Tradition lambasted H.D.s Imagism for its Decadent
Aestheticism. . . . Bush concludes that H.D. was more "escapist" than
the Pre-Raphaelites, "who testify their consciousness . . . of a world
outside themselves," and relegates H.D.s "paradise" to the
Greece of "Pater and Wilde."

The "Greece" constructed by the Victorian Hellenists as a haven for
male-male desire and associated with the image complex of "light,"
"whiteness," and sculpture . . . resembles the "crystalline"
Imagism for which H.D. gained early fame. H.D. herself would make casual
comparisons between her early style and the play of light on marble statuary at
the Louvre (where she first saw the statue of the Hermaphrodite):
"My idea of Paris," she wrote in 1936, "is a sort of holy, holy
pilgrimage to the Louvre to see the lights and shadows on the marbles and wings
of marble. All very early H.D." And Louis Untermeyer is among those critics
who praised H.D. for her possession of "the sculptors power" to
both animate and fix the image. Unintentionally evoking the Aesthetes
sculptured emblem for male transgressive desire . . . Untermeyer remarked H.D.s
fusion of "warm blood and chill stone." "Her marble
palpitates," he comments. Others, perhaps reacting subliminally to H.D.s
use of Aesthetes "unnatural" imagery, attacked H.D.s Imagism for
its cold artificiality and perversionsome describing Sea Garden as the
work of a "frozen Lesbian."

Though H.D. was not consistent in her commitment to the Greek persona,
sometimes relinquishing it in favor of others and at no time limiting it
absolutely to a certain set of qualities, we can, with reasonable accuracy,
pinpoint the aspects of the Greek persona which typically appealed to H.D. From
the early days in London, when the poet thought of herself as a Greek statue
come to life, to her epitaph"Greek flower; Greek ecstasy"the
Greek persona represented qualities she desired: aloofness, inner strength,
mental superiority, physical boyishness, courage, freedom, and wildness; a
psychological landscape comparable to the physical landscape of the New England
coastline which she . . . would forever remember and admire.

Roughly, the figure of Artemis emerges as her preferred version of the Greek
persona. . . . Hippolyta, whom H.D. would use as a mask for her own struggles,
is a follower of Artemis. At the end of her life, the poet would once again
imagine herself as Artemis in her writing of Tribute to Freud, Artemis
who is strong enough to take on the Professor. . . .

It is easy to see the particular attraction of the Greek persona for a woman
like H.D. . . . Like Amy Lowells androgynous persona, it blended
"male" and "female" characteristics, helping to free the
poet from derogatory assumptions about sentimental women poets. Like Sara
Teasdales passionate virgin, which also had connections to Greek culture,
H.D.s Artemis persona was associated with chastity and personal autonomy as
well as passion. In fact, according to Barbara Guest [Herself Defined: The
Poet H.D. and Her World], John Gould Fletcher remarked "that Teasdales
fragile appearance and her tendency to seclude herself from society reminded him
of H.D." (43). Like Elinor Wylie, who also dressed in Greek fashions and
identified herself with Artemis, H.D.s Greek self was a woman warrior of
sorts, both vulnerable and aggressive, the kind of woman who never forgot a
slight.